Hi everyone and welcome to the call. I’m going to be starting over because my microphone wasn’t on at the beginning. So welcome to the call. Thank you for coming tonight. I’m going to be doing this every Thursday night at six o’clock and our topic last week was our Real Estate Investor Matrix.
In that matrix we went over using your resources wisely so that in your first few deals you’re using the resources that you have already in hand without trying to add to that or try to find those skills or money. So what we’re going to do after that is the next four times we’re going to talk about the four F’s of real estate investing.
Now the four F’s are Find, Fund, Fix and Flip. So if you’re a wholesaler really all you have to do is Find the property. If you’re going to do rehab you have to Find the property, Fund it, Fix it and Flip it. If you’re a landlord, you just have to do three things: Find the property, Fund it, Fix it. So those are the three things for being a landlord.
So the 4 F’s are involved in all aspects of real estate no matter which one you choose. As a private lender you have to Fund it. Someone else Finds the property, Fixes it and does all that stuff for you.
So the 4 F’s are always involved. So tonight we’re going to go into on how to find the deals. That’s really the first thing you need to do. At the same time you should be looking to Fund your deals; you should be looking for money. So next week we’re going to talk about Funding the deals. I do have a link to an ebook that I wrote on Finding Private Lenders so you can go to that link later on in the presentation and download that eBook and start to read that before we do the presentation next week and that’s on wisewealthuniversity.com/pvlending. I’ll show a link to that later on when we get to that point.
Tonight I’m going to talk about all the different ways that you can Find a deal. I’ve got them on the board behind me. I’m kind of covering some of them with my head here. And what I did was I put them in green. If they’re easy you can probably implement them without much money and if they are in red it means they take more time they take more money or they take some skills. So I am going to go over those. If I put a star next to them, they are things that I’ve done so I can speak directly to them. In the other ones, I’ve investigated and kind of looked at the pricing, but have never put it into practice.
So I am going to go over all those types of marketing with you. So grab a drink, wine, tea, coffee, you know your water bottle, and strap in we’re going to go fast. But I do have an outline behind me so I’m going to sit to the side so you can take a look at it. You don’t have to write them all down now because I will be going over them as we go through the evening.
So here we go. The first one I’m going to talk about is direct mail and that does include letters and postcards. Some of the next ones are free, door-to-door: going door to door talking with people, driving for dollars: driving around your neighborhood, not free but you can be using your gas on your way to work. Bandit signs: they cost a little bit. I’ll talk about those more later. Business cards: very inexpensive way to get your message out there. Magnetic car signs: another inexpensive way to get your message out there. Networking: you can include flyers and business cards. You can see I have those linked-up there. We’ll talk about some other more expensive ones later on.
So direct mail: you can use letters or postcards. There’s a couple different types of letters, people have heard of the yellow letter and you’ve also heard of a print kind of a professional business letter and you’ve also heard about sort of a bill letter. So I use a combination of all those. I like to hit the same people 3-4 times with their mailing and I use a yellow letter, then a postcard, then another postcard depending on whom targeting. So I target two types of individuals, the first ones are home owners that have been in the property for a long time, as long as you can figure out from your county records.
And the second group are absentee landlords: those are people that have the property, they might be tired of having it. You can combine those and say…
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landlords that have owned it for more than 10 years. But sometimes landlords only owned it for a couple years and something happens in their life or they move, they get sick, there’s a job opening someplace else, and they really want to sell their property, or they have a couple kids and they just don’t have time.
So you can target those two types of people absentee owners, and people who have been in their property for a long time. A long time is more than 10 years so that’s what you want to look for. Let me check down at my notes here. So when you do the yellow letter, that is done on a yellow pad of paper. This is a little difficult to implement. It kind of works on your printer or you can outsource it. Or you can hand write the letter and then copy it on to yellow paper.
I find yellow paper doesn’t always go through my printer but if I go to Kinko’s I can rip off the pages from a yellow pad of paper and It will go through the Kinko’s printer better than it will go through mine. So I have done that before. The other letter is kind of a business letter that says you know “I’m a San Diego Real Estate investor looking to buy properties here. That’s another one.
The other one is a similar letter, but its put in a different envelope, because it’s put in a business envelope. And I’ll show you a few examples of those. And the other one I use is postcards. So the postcards I usually use the service called click-to-mail. I definitely give credit where credit is due. I learned about that from Cris Chico. You can find out his course from crischico.com. I think he has one right now for, I think ninety-seven dollars. So it gives the postcard and exactly the details on how to do it.
So you first need a relationship with the title company if you’re going to get a free list. If you’re going to go to listsource.com you going to pay per name for the list, maybe 10 cents a name. I have a relationship with the Title Company, I can pull 1500 names or records a month and that’s more than plenty to get started. Because what you do with absentee landlords and also you know, regular owners who’ve been in there a long time, is you mail to them four times a year. So you’re mailing to them quite often, so you pull the names once and you just keep using the same list.
So you know, you can find a relationship with the title company, tell them you want to farm, you want a farming list and they’ll set you up. I know with Chicago Title, I can do it right online. I don’t have to contact them anymore, it’s an online situation.
All right so, what do I do with that letter? I put it in a regular plain old envelope and I’ll show you a couple of examples of the envelopes that I use. So I use an envelope, you use a return address label, and kind of a fancy stamp. I don’t use the flag stamps; they are too basic. I want a nice big picture stamp that people notice and then you can hand address the envelope. You can find someone on Craigslist to hand address it. I have my kids hand address them. Sometimes if I’m watching something on TV I will hand address a bunch of envelopes. Very easy to outsource that.
You need to fold them up. Another way, and stuff them, put the stickers on, kids love putting stickers on by the way, that’s the fun thing for them. The other thing you can do is do what they call lumpy mail. So in lumpy mail you put something in the envelope that makes it feel tactile. You can feel something is weird about the envelope.
So someone goes I wonder what’s in there? and they want to open the envelope. So what are the 2 things I put in lumpy mail? One is sometimes I very simply just put a paperclip right on the letter and fold it up. Sometimes I put a post-it-note on there if I want to remind them of something. I stick the post-it-note on with a paperclip and then they can stick the post-it-note on their fridge.
You can put in candy. But it has to be really thin as now the post office has a lot of different requirements. So I’ve gone to some of these little foam stickers that you can buy at Michael’s or Walmart. A big container of foam stickers and sometimes they sell them cheaply when they’re out of season so these are kinda like the landscape ones. I put that piece of foam in the envelope; and it makes people open it up.
So what does the envelope look like? I can’t show the address on here but here’s what happens when the envelope comes back. So let me show that to you. You see a return address label on the top and a nice fancy stamp. So I use several return address labels. That was kind of a house one. Here’s another one that came back. And that one is my spring flower one. And the other return address label, this is kind of the one for barbecuing, looks like you are doing a summer barbecue.
So how do I get all of these different labels and how do I do it inexpensively? Well I use Avery labels online and I usually buy the labels from Office Depot. I don’t buy the Avery labels. The Office Depot ones are actually cheaper, you can buy a big package of them in bulk and you do your design on averylabels.com and you just print them on your own printer. You can pick any pictures you want, you can upload a picture and you put your return address on there. Now when I put the return address, let me show you this one again, you see my address there? I’ve put Apartment C. It’s really Suite C, but I want people to think it comes from an individual person, so they will open up and not a business, so I put Apartment C. It still goes back to my mailbox. All these letters came back to my mailbox, okay, because they had the wrong address on them.
When you’re using addresses from the Title company, they’re coming from the people’s tax records. So this is the address where they mail the tax bill to, and if people don’t update their address when they move, especially if it’s a rental property and they’re moving their home address, the tax bill may not come to them the next year. They may have to, you know, call the county and pay for it, or whatever and get it forwarded to them. So they have to update their home address for their rental properties in order to receive the mail. Okay so that’s the first thing. That’s what the envelopes look like.
So now what do I do? How do I get the list? When I get the list it’s usually in an Excel spreadsheet and what I do is do a mail merge with that. I mail merge the addresses that I want to put on the envelopes. But I don’t put them on address labels. I just mail merge them as if they are address labels and I just run them through the printer as if they are return address labels and I just use regular paper. So I am going to flash it real quickly up here because I can’t show you the addresses. So that’s one that I’ve done and that’s one of the lists I’ve used.
So as I go through it and hand address the envelopes, I can just put a check mark when I mailed them. See, you see that one had quite a few check marks. You know I’ve done that list three or four times. If you see a red or yellow circle that’s because it came back and had the wrong address. So as soon as it comes back I circle it and then I take a bunch of them at once and spend time looking them up online and trying to find, you know, what the person’s new address is, using these different, you know, WhitePages or People Search or something like that, People Tracker. You can get an account I think for thirty-nine dollars to look up as many addresses as you want.
So that’s my address label. The business letter I’ll show it to you. I don’t have any yellow letter examples right now. So I do have a kinda business letter and you do have to sign it. You should sign it in blue ink. That’s the one I just showed you. And you just fold that and put it in the envelope and then the last thing I put on is the stamp. You really don’t want to put the stamp on ahead of time because what if you mess up the envelope? So the stamp is the last thing, cuz that is the thing you paid for. So you put that on at the end. And then send them all out. So that’s how you do your mailings.
You’ve got to pick your area. Pick your street. Go through the title company. Get your list. Print it out as if it’s going to be on address labels but you just print it out on regular paper so you can write on it. You also go to Avery labels and do your return address labels. Put those on every envelope. Then you hand address, stuff the envelope. Use a paper clip or a little foam dealie or a thin piece of a candy, whatever you want to make people curious to open it up. I think at Easter once we put in some of that green grass, that you use at Easter, we stuffed a little bit in each envelope and it made it kind of a little thicker, so people wanted to open it up. It was a fun project. Okay so that’s direct mail.
I send out letters. I sometimes use the yellow letter or the business letter there and you know the heading is “I’m a San Diego investor looking to buy your San Diego property”. I also do the postcards, I use a modified version of the postcard from Cris Chico. The other thing you going to want to need is a phone. You can use Google Voice phone number that can be forwarded to your house phone, your cell phone, or your partner’s cell phone. You can forward it to wherever you want. So Google Voice numbers are free.
Or you can also buy a track phone that has a local number and just have that number being used in your letters. In that way your letters, when people call that phone you’re only paying for the calls that they make, so you don’t have a monthly charge. That phone’s just sitting there waiting for it to ring. And you know when someone calls that number that it’s from the letters so you can answer it right away. So you have to carry that extra track phone around with you. It’s another inexpensive way you know to have another phone without an expensive monthly phone service.
The other service I use is Grasshopper. You can get an 800 number or just a regular local number and you can plug in some scripts that will speak to the homeowner when they call the number. And it can forward to your phone as well. So those are the services that I use in association with my direct mail. Its really the biggest and best ways to get good deals.
People call me from those letters. Most of the deals that I get did not come from the MLS or Realtors because they’re a little more expensive when they come from a realtor but you definitely need to network with Realtors for those deals. I’ll talk a little bit more about networking at the bottom. So the next thing on the list is door-to-door. So door-to-door would include door-knocking, leaving Flyers and business cards as you go.
So Business cards: I get those at Vistaprint. You can get a couple of different business cards that can be, you know, landlord, it can be foreclosure business cards. It can be “do you want to sell your home” business cards. And then you can also do, I use a half page flyer so I can get 2 per page and I’ll leave that at the door if the person is not home. If they are home I’ll hand them, you know, my business card as we’ve already had a little bit of a chat. So there are several ways you can do the door to door.
So one way to do the door to door is to get your list from the title company, look it up, look up the houses you want to target and then go Door Knock some of those doors that you got from the title company. Not the absentee owners, that wont help you. Those people don’t, the owners don’t live at the rental. But for owners who have been in the house a long time, it’s a very good way to check that you’re getting a good search. So when we go door-to-door for long-term owners we say to ourselves oh this must be just right because these people have been in the house a long time. So that is very helpful. You can also get a foreclosure list and go door knocking on the foreclosure list, in that case you also want to have a business card or flyer to leave.
Driving for dollars: You can incorporate driving for dollars with your direct mail so that’s the next thing on the list. Whatever addresses you find, when you drive for dollars, and you’re looking for houses that need some work; You know there’s newspapers in the driveway, they didn’t cut the grass, the bushes aren’t trimmed. I trained my kids since they were like 6 to be able to find absentee owner properties. Then you can go back and write those addresses down and look up the owners, either at your county recorder’s office or online if that’s available in your state. I know it’s not available in California. But it is available in a lot of States like Phoenix, Texas. You know you can find the owner pretty quickly on their counties website or online. So incorporate driving for dollars and then mail to them.
What’s the next thing we got? We have bandit signs. All right, bandit signs do work in certain areas. They’re not that useful in really populated areas or cities in the nicer areas because the police take them away, other investors take them down. I have put them out on Friday nights and taken them back down on Sunday. There are some cities that have code enforcement and actually pulled them on Saturday and Sunday, so when I went back to get them, I only had like one out of twenty signs still up on a Sunday night, so that’s one thing to think about.
You can put bandit signs out, a little bit further onto the more rural areas where they have less police coverage. It seems to work better in those areas. It doesn’t work as well in Southern California. We tend to use direct mail more often but bandit signs can be ordered from banditsigns.com. That is where I’ve gotten mine. What I like to do is test test test. So I order blank ones and they are yellow and we hand write on it with a huge black magic marker. You get the really big markers at Home Depot. They have a really big one, its about this fat. You can write really big with one of those. And so you test your message and see how that works. It works really well to put the signs on vacant houses because sometimes the owner then calls you or the neighbors call you and tell you who the owner is. Its a good thing and those signs stay up longer because the police think someone had permission to put the signs in the yard. That’s just a little trick of mine.
All right what do we have next? Okay business cards: I talked about that. Magnetic car signs, an excellent way to find a property. You’re not going to get all your deals that way. You probably get one or two a year from your magnetic sign. And you can also order those from Vistaprint. I also ordered them I think from, I’m not sure, I think I got them from banditsigns.com as well and those are thicker. The ones with vistaprint are a little thin. They both work. At Banditsigns.com, you can also order kind of generic signs that investors like to use and just write in your phone number. But there’s some like “avoid foreclosure” and different signs like that, so bandit signs, magnetic signs on your car, these things really attract attention. You can also get, if you go to grasshopper.com you can get kind of get a special phone number that’s easy to remember, so that’s good for bandit signs.
Networking is next: you’ve got to network with Realtors. Realtors can sometimes find you the deals; they have pocket listings of people they know that just put something up. It’s not ready to show yet and they will probably call you first to let you look at it. We did find a lot of our REO’s through realtors. They would call us before it was listed and that was really helpful.
You should also network at real estate clubs. I have done a lot of my networking there and it’s a good place to find other wholesalers and private lenders. So go to some local real estate clubs, interact with people, give them a business card, call them after you give your business card because if you never call them it wasn’t really a network.
All right so those are kind of what I call the green ways to get deals, they are green, they’re cheap, they’re not all fast but they are something you can implement. Pick one of those things and implement this weekend. You might not get all the direct mail done but get your return address labels done or go buy the stamps or make a connection with the title rep, order a magnetic sign from banditsigns.com or Vistaprint. Order some new business cards. Those are all things that you can do in relatively short time.
Okay now on the other side of the board over here are things that are a little bit hard to do. Print ads: you can definitely put a print ad in. You pay money for it, some of those little Pennysaver ads that get distributed for free. Suburban shopper, they’re little free things that come in the mail box.
I have not gotten any deals from them. I used to put ads there, old school is put ads in the paper. I didn’t really get the calls from there except from other investors. Broadcast TV costs a lot of money. You might not be ready for that till you have a lot of deals going. Get your deal flow going first. Social media: you can definitely post and connect with people on a Facebook groups. There’s a lot of real estate groups on Facebook as well as Google+ and its a way to connect with other wholesalers or people who might want to fund a deal or other partners, people who might want to partner on the deal with you.
So social media and website SEO kind of go together there. I have some web-sites that I’ve used to attract sellers but you have to do a lot of SEO with the website to get it ranked in search engines, so if that’s something that you’re really good at and maybe that’s what you do in your JOB that would be great. But to start out with I wouldn’t start out with websites, because you could just spend a lot of time on it. You won’t get that many leads from the website. A lot of people try to sell you, you know a website. I spent a lot of money on SEO where I’ve hired virtual assistants to do the SEO for me and I just really didn’t get a lot of traction from it. I think it has to be a concerted effort.
Certainly once you can put the website on your print media, your flyers and your business cards and then get people to go to the website for more information that’s definitely a way to go. They don’t feel as threatened by going to a website and reading the information as they do by calling you. And that’s why we have the recorded messages on grasshopper.com because they can call and not be intimidated. So web sites are a nice easy way to you know kind of get the information giving them a free report but not be too intimidating.
So the next ones are billboards and bus stops: I’ve look at the pricing on those. I never decided to buy them. You will see some of the bigger companies using those. They will use billboards and surely bus stop seats. I know Realtors definitely use those a lot. And certainly some of the big HomeVester companies use billboards. So those are the more expensive things.
So definitely you want to work on the green ways to find deals that are up on the board. I want to say left side or right side but I am not sure when I turn around which way it’s going to be. So I’m going to back away and let you write down a few those in case you didn’t get a chance to while we took some notes. And while I’m doing that, I will look over the comments and see if there are any comments or questions you know that I can answer for you. All right take a look, take a few notes and I’ll be back in a second.
All right I hope you were able to write down some of those ways to find deals. I did get one question coming in and that is: “Janice if I have no money to get started how do I get a deal?What’s the best method to get started?’
What I would do if I didn’t have any marketing budget? I certainly advise you to get one as soon as possible, but I would make the connection with the title company and get a list of either absentee owners, or well, absentee owners you’d still have to mail to, which would cost some money, so absentee owners or owners that have had the property for quite a long time and then I would do some door-to-door. My speakers were giving me some back background noise, there.
I would go door-to-door and talk to these people. I would have a flyer and a business card and I would leave that at the houses when no one was home. And that’s going to cost the least amount of money. Driving for dollars: you can do that on the way to work, take a different street on the way to work. When you’re out going, you know, on a Saturday with your family, go down some different roads and when you are out going on a hike and write down some different areas that you see where maybe there’s some houses that need some work.
Look those up, go down go to the county records, that is a free place where you can do that. I was thinking about one more thing about your websites. You can definitely put your websites on your magnetic car signs. That would be inexpensive way to go, it wouldn’t cost that much, so get magnetic car signs, the business cards, print some flyers on your own printer and get your list from the title company and that’s a great way to get started. As soon as you have a little bit money just to buy the stamps, start doing direct mail. If you are going to stuff letters yourself, go ahead do 100, 200, 300 at a time, and be able to handle the calls as they come in. Don’t do as many, do you know, do 300 a week. Make that your goal.
You know, don’t outsource it at first because that costs more. You’re just going to pay for the stamps initially so you know fifty cents a letter. All right and that is the best way for you guys to find some deals.
Thank you all for coming to the training tonight. Next week I’m going to be talking about how to fund the deals and I’m going to share with you the website. There’s a couple of links that I am going to put up here so that you can get your free ebook about Finding Private Lenders and start looking through that. You’ll get a few emails that go with it to prompt you to implement what’s in the ebook.
So let me give you a couple links so you can stay in touch with me on. Here’s my link on Twitter and I am the pinkprofessor that’s why I wore the shirt today. It’s quite warm here in San Diego so it is a warm day. I am kind of reminding everyone that we’re warm. Sorry if you guys have snow or bad weather, its kind of hot here today. So follow me on Twitter at Pinkprofessor and the other one would be to go to wisewealthuniversity.com/hangouts and subscribe to the weekly hangouts. You get an email automatic reminder about the hangout and the topic for each week so that’s a good way to keep in touch. I only send, you know, that one email reminding you about the Hangout so that’s another place to go.
I’m going to share with you a screenshot just so you can look at the, lets see, I can show you exactly where the…, all right so that is the private lenders page. It’s called wisewealthuniversity.com/pvlending. If you go to that page you’ll be able to enter your name and email and download my ebook on how to Find Private Lenders. You can do more deals and bigger deals if you have your Private Lending already lined up and hard money is very very expensive and sucks all the profit out of the deal. So that’s my little lesson for tonight, now let me go back to the, stop the screenshare there for a minute.
Anyway those are the things that you can do to get ready for next week’s call. Let me just check the messages, see if there’s any more comments. All right remember try doing some door-to-door work. I know it’s a little bit harder to get off the ground but at least get your list from the title company. So you know your task before next week is to get that e-book and go to your private lenders and then go to your title company and get a list of absentee owners or owners who have owned their property for a long time, more than ten year years. And you can get ready to door knock or at least get a flyer ready, get your business cards ready or one of those items all right?
Thank you everyone and we’ll see you next Thursday, same time, same location. On Facebook, Google+, my website or on the wisewealthuniversity page on Google+. Thank you and have a great night.
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